Coach Mike Krzyzewski said he’s still energized to move forward, even after last week’s opening round NCAA tournament loss

Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski held a press conference on Wednesday, just has he usually does this time of year.

Only instead of being at an NCAA tournament site talking about an upcoming Sweet 16 opponent, the 67-year-old Hall of Famer was back home in Durham, allaying concerns about his health and his motivation while touching on a number of subjects dealing with the past and his future with the Blue Devils.

“This past year I had a few setbacks,” Krzyzewski said of his trying 34th season at Duke, which included a near collapse from exhaustion, the death of his beloved older brother and a stunning opening-round NCAA loss to 14th-seeded Mercer last week. “I had an episode with health at the Wake (Forest) game and I wanted to clear the air that I’m good going forward.”

Mike Krzyzewski, flanked by assistants Jeff Capel and Steve Wojciechowski had a health scare during a late-season loss at Wake Forest

As for the health of his program, Krzyzewski said that it’s as solid as ever despite a second early ending in three years at the hands of a double-digit seed.

Rather than basing his evaluations on a single season or game –“whether that means you won the national championship or you got eliminated like we did this year” – Krzyzewski said he prefers to assess things over five-year segments.

Surprisingly, he said the only do-over he’d like to have over the one that started in 2000 and just ended outside of unavoidable circumstances such as injury, would be redshirting forward Ryan Kelly as a freshman so that he could have been the veteran leader this year’s team so sorely lacked.

As for the next five years, he said the only certainty is that he’ll still be coaching the Blue Devils. “I’m excited about that and looking forward to planning it out.” Other than his presence on the bench, he said it’s still too early to tell how things will play out, considering the fluid nature of his roster and expected changes in the rules governing underclassmen entering the NBA draft.

Krzyzewski said that it’s only a matter of time before current one-and-done system is replaced by new guidelines that require players to be at least 20 years old and have played two seasons of college ball before becoming draft eligible.

“I think the NBA wants that and I think that the players union, in a better organization, would want that also,” he said. “That would be good for basketball.”

Until the change happens, Krzyzewski said he’ll continue to recruit one-and-done players such as Kyrie Irving, Austin Rivers and, most likely, current stars Jabari Parker and Rodney Hood.

Coach Mike Krzyzewski said he would be ‘an idiot’ not to recruit one-and-done caliber players such as Jabari Parker

“If you’re placed in the position where one of the best players in the United States, who are great kids, want to come to your school, you’d have to be an idiot to say no,” Krzyzewski said. “I know I’ve been called an idiot by some people, but I’m not going to be an idiot about that.”

The biggest drawback of having top players stay only one season is the leadership void it helps create. Krzyzewski said he and his staff need to do a better job going forward of bringing out the leadership qualities in the players they know will be back.

It’s still not certain who that will be next year, since Parker and Hood have not yet announced their decisions or even talked with Krzyzewski about their futures. But even if they both leave as expected – and as their coach seems to be encouraging them to do – Krzyzewski was confident to assert that his Blue Devils “will be pretty good” in 2014-15.

“How good we’ll be, some of it will be who we have coming back, but also in the development of (leadership),” he said. “In all of our national championship teams we had amazing leadership on the court … so I need to pay even more attention to that and I can do a better job of that. That’s going to be a focus for me going forward.”

Krzyzewski said that task will be aided by the personalities of incoming freshmen Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones, Justise Winslow and Grayson Allen.

“Three of them have been the leaders of their teams. That helps,” he said. “Only one of them (Jones) is a point guard and he’s a pretty good leader. In fact, he’s an outstanding leader.”

Regardless of the makeup of next year’s team, Krzyzewski said that it’s becoming increasingly more difficult for Duke to maintain its status as one of the nation’s elite programs and continue to compete at the highest level.

It’s that challenge he said he’s still motivated to meet.

“The biggest thing for us is if we can win the whole thing,” he said. “That’s what I would want my team to an opportunity to do next year and that’s how we’re going to try to coach them.”